Big Bang
by Laura Harkness
Summary: Ten, Jack, Space, Time, the Universe, Einstein, Black Holes, Vortices, Squirrels and Turtles. The beginning of *everything* is hijacked and the Time Lord and Captain find themselves caught in the thick of things, fighting for the lives of those they love.
1. Part 1

**BIG BANG**

**Author's Note:** This is the first of an ongoing multi-story space opera written over the span of several years, and my first attempt at fiction.

**Part I **

**Prologue**

How to describe them?

For one living in the universe of Time Lords and humans they were unimaginable: unfathomably ancient; unbelievably different.

Existing in the absence time: it was insignificant.

Inhabiting a reality without matter or energy: neither was required.

Timeless and formless: not really a "they" – or an "it"; instead one consciousness made up of the consciousnesses of trillions.

The closest approximate for a human, or maybe a Time Lord, would be a lake of unified composition, totally clear and totally cold. A lake the size of a universe.

They had molded eternity to imitate their existence and were forever.

They had no name although once, impossibly long ago, had many such designations. Discarding such outrageous wrappings they continued on never endingly: fantastically intelligent, dreadfully united and terrifyingly self-centered.

They were single-minded: unceasing continuation and unending evolution, if there was anywhere left to evolve, their sole purpose. Nothing ever got in their way.

When taking the opportunity to "look" (a relative term, to be sure) they "saw" only themselves.

If resembling a lake, infinitely large, cold, clear and darkly deep, they were furthermore calm. And quiet: eons would pass without a single sound. Endlessly patient, although time was meaningless – in the event that change was required they would watch and act appropriately. And perfectly. Without hesitation and relentlessly they would proceed.

And they needed a new home.

**Human Traditions**

The Doctor waved good-bye by wiggling his fingers at Rose through the shop window. He smiled as she put on a brave face while the seamstress wrapped what looked like a tape measure around her chest. "Humans!" he thought to himself as he winked at her and turned away, "humans and their traditions!" Rose was being fitted for a bridesmaid dress; one of her chums was getting married. She'd be so employed for the remainder of the morning and the rest of the day. What had she said to him? Something about "batching" it… "Have fun batching it," she'd told him as he'd walked out of the shop as quickly as he could. It wasn't the kind of place he enjoyed being in and he was happy to have extricated himself as easily as he did. He opened his eyes a little wider as he made the connection and he spoke out loud, albeit softly as he walked down the street: "Ah! Batching as in bachelor! Right… I'm on my own until tomorrow!" He stuck his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat as the wind caught him. "On my own! The world is my oyster! What to do first?"

He set off down the street, walking in no direction in particular. Even with his long legs, at his usual quick pace, others were whizzing by him on their way to... somewhere. Many had their hands to their ears, glued to their mobiles. To a soul they avoided his eyes, wrapped in their own little universes that revolved around whatever they were talking about. To them, he was invisible and that was okay. He had nothing in particular to do… nowhere to go and nothing ominous or death-defying or even slightly sinister hanging over his head. "What a novel feeling!"

He made his way to a small green area, a park, really. It was a beautiful day – sunny sky, not too hot, but not too cold. He slowly turned a complete circle and examined his surroundings. On a bench, in the shadows beneath a tree was a young couple, oblivious to all but each other. In the play area a couple of young mothers (or were they nannies? He had no idea) were minding a small group of children as they swung and twirled and tilted. An older man, dressed up in his tattered but still presentable suit was walking a small dog on a lead, and throwing what looked liked peanuts to the squirrels that were massing a few yards away. The Doctor smiled once again, watching the squirrels as they busily grabbed at the nuts. "Such a wonderful and wondrous planet! And these humans: so simple, so peaceful, so… naïve," he thought, a small part of his brain (but quite large compared to humans'!) reminding him how important it was to protect this precious planet and its inhabitants.

As he watched the squirrels devouring their meal, he suddenly realized that one of the peanuts looked a bit odd: it was shimmering. Well, not quite shimmering, it seemed to be feebly vibrating. The squirrels moved away from it warily as it seemed to levitate ever so slightly off the ground. Abruptly it went 'pop' and detonated into tiny shards of legume. The squirrels scattered. That was followed by an extended overture of 'pops' as the leftover peanuts followed suit and made their own tiny explosions. The Doctor looked around and raised an eyebrow; no one else had seemed to notice the exploding nuts.

"Now, isn't this curious!" he thought to himself, but as he approached the debris to have a better look he noticed a soft vibrating at his side. His attention, drawn away from the peanuts, was now fully on his left hip. "Not only vibrating, but a bit warm, and getting warmer!" He said to himself he started to fumble in his coat pocket. No, not that… it, whatever it was, was in his suit pocket. He started pulling out widgets and gizmos and gadgets and tossing them on the ground as he fumbled for the source of his growing discomfort. "Gotcha!" he exclaimed as he finally pulled out a well-worn buckled leather strap about three inches wide and ten inches long. "Ow!" he added, but did not drop it to the ground as it was behaving even more curiously than he expected – it was pulsing a faint shade of mauve…

**Moonrise**

A continent away, well, actually an Atlantic ocean away and a _half_-continent away, Josh was heading home from his late shift. "It's a job!" he thought wearily as he fumbled with the radio trying to pick up something that would sooth his frayed nerves as he drove down the dark road. Working third shift wasn't so bad, but everyone who worked in hospitals knew that weird things happened at night. Not only the drunks and the over-doses and the auto accident victims – they were to be expected in any emergency room at night. But the really strange things that some people did to themselves, out of loneliness or despair usually took place during the hours of darkness… those patients were the ones that deeply disturbed him and often lingered in his mind sometimes hours after he'd left. "The hour of the wolf" he'd heard it called, when good judgment disappears and is replaced with desolation.

He knew that such desperate people weren't too far away from himself. He lived alone, worked at night, and didn't socialize too much with his colleagues as they seemed to do with each other. He had hobbies that he would sometimes become a bit obsessed with – right now it was astronomy and he'd sold off or junked the trappings from his last hobby (flying radio controlled airplanes) and replaced it with the paraphernalia of his new: a beautiful Newtonian reflector telescope, eyepieces, filters and star charts.

Josh sighed and gave up on the radio; he was in the hilly part of his drive where it was sometimes hard to find any decent channels. "Yes," he thought, "people can be weird, and the weirdness will intensify with the full moon coming on in a day or so…" He glanced out the window to his left, looking for the moon… that should be, well, it should be rising. "It should be up by now," he noted to the steering wheel, slightly alarmed. He made this drive every morning at this exact same time and yesterday it had come up just before he'd left the hospital. He remembered pausing to gaze at it as he walked to his car. This morning it should be coming up now, about twenty minutes later. The sky was clear… where was it? "This is strange." He said to no one in particular as he pulled off the side of the road, grabbed his binoculars and stepped out of his car.

Standing there, alone at the side of the road in the dark – he was in the middle of nowhere – there was no light to speak of other than starlight and the haze of the city far off to the west. He scanned the eastern horizon with his binoculars – nothing. There was nothing! Not even the briefest scent of light coming up from the landscape. He pulled out his Blackberry and opened the directory. He scrolled down and found what he was looking for – another astronomy fanatic – but more than that, someone he'd been talking with over the Internet who happened to actually be a real astronomer, and who worked at the Royal Observatory. Quickly calculating the time difference, Josh determined that his friend should be at work and he texted without looking at the little keys: "Alan, something is wrong!"


	2. Part 2

**BIG BANG**

**Part II**

**The Burdens of Management**

Ianto Jones knocked on the door frame as he walked into the office of Captain Jack Harkness: three light taps, just as a courtesy. Jack had told him once that he appreciated Ianto's habit of doing that – none of the others did – they would come barging in without warning, usually talking as they entered and rudely interrupting whatever he'd been doing. "Such is the burden of management!" The couple of seconds during the knocking, he'd told Ianto, gave him a chance to properly file away whatever he'd been thinking or doing. To Ianto, it seemed eminently reasonable, and he _always_ knocked first.

Jack looked up and smiled, "What's up?"

"I'm not sure, but something is going on at the Royal Observatory, you might want to connect and have a look."

Jack nodded and returned to his laptop, dismissing Ianto in the same efficient movement. But then he looked over his shoulder and called out, "Who do we have there?"

Ianto turned to look at him, "Alan Kroeker. Not official, mind you, but aware."

Jack was already into the system, looking for breadcrumbs and he found something immediately. Alan Kroeker was texting with someone… someone in the Western United States who'd just contacted him with a piece of improbable news. In real time Jack watched their conversation. The person in the U.S. was clearly alarmed, if not verging on totally freaked. In another computer window Jack was examining the American man's bio. Name of Josh Rasey, resident of Taos New Mexico, emergency room technician, divorced. And… (Jack rolled his eyes) an astronomy hobbyist. "God save me from amateurs!" he exclaimed loudly, the others in the office pointedly ignoring him.

But even as he looked back to his display, Jack's heart was beginning to beat a little faster – something did seem to be odd. Rasey appeared to know what he was talking about and Kroeker seemed to be taking him _very_ seriously….

Jack's train of thought was interrupted -- by Owen coming through the door, and as expected _not_ knocking first. "Jack, I just got a call from the Navy, seems there is something wrong with the tide height on the Thames."

Jack looked at Owen's face and emptied his mind. It was a sort of recalibration he did to clear out his "cache" (as he thought of it) and refocus entirely on the situation at hand. Abruptly, all of the phones at Torchwood started ringing simultaneously. Owen gave an exasperated look and rushed out of Jack's office to answer one of the calls and Jack picked up his own phone, but he really didn't listen to whoever was speaking to him. He stared up at the ceiling and already knew that whatever it was, it was going to be bad. Very Bad.

With his free right hand he lightly touched his heart. "Doctor," he sub-vocalized. "Doctor… I need you."

**Something's Burning**

Wil was at the gym, working out. She was working out really hard and producing quite a sweat. But she wasn't thinking about sweat, nor was she thinking about the elliptical machine that she was pumping with her legs, arms swinging freely at her side. Instead, she was reliving a rather embarrassing meeting earlier that day in her department at the London School of Economics. The Chair of her department, the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method had mortified her by calling her his "little Wilamena" in front of the rest of the faculty. "My little Wilamena," he'd said, "you can't really expect that we'll let you teach a course called 'The Physics of Sport'! You just have to get that silly notion out of your pretty little head!"

Wil was incensed – not only had he been insulting and condescending, but he'd called her by her given name, and no one _ever_ did that. "Jerk, jerk, jerk…" she chanted to herself as she continued marching on her machine.

Sometimes she wondered what she was doing, instructing at LSE when what she really wanted to be doing was particle physics research at the Large Hadron Collider, not trying to teach physics to snotty-nosed kids who would never be interested in science. "It just burns me," she thought… but then, she noticed through the haze of emotions, she _was_ burning. She was overheated way more than usual. But it wasn't her, she abruptly realized, it was her elliptical. It was warm – hot to the touch, in fact, and she hopped off just in time to see it start glowing a dull orange.

From behind her she heard, "What the hell?" and turned around to see someone else hopping off an exercise bike and patting his legs down, as if trying to put out a fire. She looked around and while she _saw_, she didn't _understand_ what it was she was seeing – it looked like everything in the room was getting hot as if there was a fire, but there was no fire. The plastic yoga mats began to curl up and… what was it they were doing? Melting?!

The small handful of people who were there at the athletic club on a late weekday morning started moving towards the doors. Other plastic items began to morph into odd shapes: the exercise balls and the small hand weights sagged and pooled. Wil leaned over to pick up her gym bag, but it looked unusual, "Damn! Plastic!" she hissed and decided to leave it and get out… She definitely needed to get out of this place which made absolutely no logical sense… A place that looked more like a Salvador Dali painting than the gym she visited fastidiously every day. Thank God she had, in the pocket of her shorts her keys and her cell phone. The rest of her stuff she could live without.

As she made her way through the door she took a deep breath of cool air and thankfully observed that things appeared more normal outside the gym. But did they? People were filing out of other buildings, more or less calmly although some did look a bit frightened as their eyes did what her eyes were doing – taking in the situation.

A man, a few feet away from her, was tossing his mobile back and forth between his hands as if it were… hot. She pulled out her own cell from her pocket and it was indeed warm – warmer than just her body heat would've made it. But her device was metal, not plastic. It had been designed for rugged backcountry use and how in the world it could be so warm, she didn't have a clue. As a physicist she knew it was a fundamental law of nature that things just did not get hot by themselves.

As she examined it, the mobile rang and Wil stared at it in surprise. If she'd not been so worried, she might've smiled. When she'd gotten her Doctorate from Oxford she'd been contacted by an organization that wanted to pay her a small retainer fee. "Consultant, as needed," they'd said. She would've forgotten about them except for the monthly deposits to her bank account. In over two years she'd not heard a peep, until now that is. Now, as she looked down, she saw the word "Torchwood" on her cell's display and she quickly answered the call with a calm and professional "Here".


	3. Part 3

**BIG BANG**

**Part III**

**A Quick Trip**

As The Doctor concentrated on the wristband he excluded everything else from his consciousness. The teleport was warm, vibrating slightly and… speaking. But what was it saying? It started out as barely a whisper, but then increased in volume: "Doctor… I need you." It was a familiar voice. The Doctor breathed in deeply through is nose and then held his breath for a moment. During that moment, a million thoughts went through his head; a million calculations were analyzed and a decision was made. "I'm coming," he murmured to the leather strap as he put it back into his coat pocket.

He quickly retrieved all the objects he'd tossed on the ground and whirled out of the park, towards the TARDIS. Briefly he considered stopping at the shop to tell Rose where he was going, but then he remembered her instructions to him -- that she needed 24 hours to take care of "things"…. And whatever those "things" were, it was clear he was _not_ invited. He hadn't been hurt by this exclusion, at least not much. Although the "wedding shower" party that he was missing that evening sounded potentially interesting and he wondered if it really involved some sort of group soaking by water; something he might enjoy under the right circumstances, as long as the water was warm! At any rate, he was not welcome, and that was that. "Oh, I'll just take a quick trip and she'll never know I was gone," he thought as he navigated down the street, past the crowded cafes and shops.

And, there she was, right where he'd left her – he smiled despite himself, just like he did every time he saw her. He pulled out the key from his inside suit coat pocket, noticing that although it was typically warm to the touch that it was a little warmer than usual, and caressed the TARDIS affectionately as he unlocked the door and stepped inside. "Right! Cardiff!! We're off!!" He sang out, full-voiced, as he set the coordinates and started up his old ship. As the TARDIS began to dematerialize he spun around and then hopped, just a little, into the air. "24 Hours? I would've been bored to death!" he sang. "Allons-y!"

**The Second Law of Thermodynamics**

He opened the door and blinked in the bright sunlight. He was in his usual parking place at the Millennium Centre. Locking the door behind him, The Doctor stood, leaning against the TARDIS, trying his best to look debonair -- it was silly, really, but sometimes next to Jack he felt a bit graceless. He'd never admit it to him, but Jack _was_ exceedingly charming, and in a contest of elegance and style, well… The Doctor wasn't quite sure who might win. Not that it mattered… much.

Of course he sensed it when Jack appeared in a shimmer of transport light, but feigned surprise when the man silently moved into his field of vision.

"Captain."

"Doctor."

"What do you want?"

"Don't I get a hug first?"

The big smile on Jack's face was infectious and The Doctored grinned as the two men came together in a warm embrace. Stepping back, The Doctor had already moved on, "Something wrong?"

Jack stood quietly, blue eyes meeting brown. The Captain wasn't purposefully being obtuse. It was just that he wasn't sure where to start. In fact, he wasn't sure exactly what it was that was happening. It wasn't just one thing, as far as he knew, it was several… at least. Maybe more…

The Doctor waited patiently. With Jack, more than anyone else he knew, it was worth waiting for something to be said, rather than blunder on ahead without him.

In the short time that things had started to go "wrong", to use The Doctor's term, Jack hadn't actually put into words the thoughts that were swimming in his mind. When he mentally shook himself and finally did try to verbalize them for The Doctor, they sounded almost unbelievable: "There seems to be a problem with some of the fundamental laws of physics".

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. Jack went on, "I'm not joking. You know the second law of thermodynamics? I think maybe it's not working so well." He paused briefly then continued. "And then there's the moon."

"The moon?"

"You know Newton, Galileo and Kepler? The moon seems to not be in the right place any more."

"What else?"

"The tides."

"Well, of course… if the moon's wrong, so would be the tides."

"Yes, of course."

There was a long silence. Again The Doctor waited for Jack.

"Doctor, what could be nuking the laws of physics?"

**The Absence of Danger**

The Doctor and Jack were in the TARDIS. "Einstein," The Doctor whispered under his breath, but Jack heard him say it anyway – or maybe _felt_ him say it was a more truthful way of putting it.

"What do you mean?" The Captain asked.

The Doctor sat down on the only chair in the TARDIS control room and sighed. "Jack, Einstein was the closest thing to a Time Lord your planet ever produced." Jack raised his eyebrows at the apparent slight. "I'm not kidding, Einstein was brilliant, and it takes one to know one. He was starting to understand Time and Space like no other human ever had. If he'd lived for a decent amount of time, say another 500 or 1000 years, he would've probably come close to figuring out what the Time Lords knew about spacetime."

The Doctor was quiet for a moment, wondering if Jack would've caught on to the gist of it. He had. "E equals MC squared," Jack murmured, awe in his voice.

And The Doctor responded in a hushed tone, "The Cosmological Constant…" But then he raised his voice. "If the laws of physics are breaking down, there are some big ones, some _huge _ones that are going to cause tremendous problems. And problems not just for you humans and your planet, the galaxy, and the universe… BUT FOR ME!"

The Doctor whirled around and started punching manically at various buttons, displays and levers on the TARDIS console. "Oh no, no, no, no, no. Don't do that!" he shouted as he stopped clouting on a keyboard and ran towards the entrance, Jack in pursuit. The Doctor grabbed the door and tried to open it to no effect. He gave it a couple more shakes and a dirty look before stepping back to explain to Jack that the TARDIS had gone into 'lockdown' – "She won't let us leave. Something terrible is happening and she's trying her best to protect me… Erm… Us, that is, she's protecting us!"

Jack stood mutely, slightly slack-jawed and shaking his head. He was thinking about his team… they were out there, trying to deal with whatever it was that was happening, and here he was, _stuck_.

"Imprisoned?" he looked at The Doctor incredulously. "Am I imprisoned by your ship?"

"Well, not exactly…"

"Then get me out of here!"

"I can't, not really," said The Doctor. "There's nothing I can do. The lockdown protocol is designed to not only protect me from danger; it is designed to protect me from myself during times of danger. She won't let me break the protocol until she decides it is safe. Beyond that, she's smarter than I am." At that, Jack's eyes widened – he'd never heard The Doctor admit that anyone or any _thing_ was smarter than he. The Doctor had noticed the reaction. "She is, you know. I can't fool her. I can't trick her. I can't even make a convincing argument to change her mind."

"Sounds just like a woman!" replied Jack.

There was silence again.

"But how does it… she… How does she know we're in danger? What does the TARDIS know that we don't?" Jack asked. "And can she do something about it or are we just supposed to sit here on our behinds and wait?"

The Doctor's eyes lit up and he smiled one of his biggest smiles. "Oh…. She can do something alright!" he said. "She can steer us clear of it – take us away from the danger, to some place where it is _not_!" He ran back to the keyboard he'd been pounding on earlier and started manically typing and muttering to the display screen. Jack moved closer in order to see and hear better what The Doctor was doing. The Time Lord was speaking very quickly; almost as if he was talking to someone else, Jack thought, someone other than himself. "The obverse of danger… the opposite of the current situation, that's what I want!" The Doctor said to the monitor. "Take me somewhere far away and safe so that…." His words drifted off as he pushed a few buttons, pulled a lever or two and Jack heard the familiar sound of the TARDIS engines. The Doctor let out with a frenzied laugh: "Ha! Ha! We've done it! We're moving! We're going!" The Doctor was jumping up and down, clearing at least two feet as he leapt repeatedly in the air.

They were indeed 'moving', with more shaking and banging than Jack recalled was normal. He grabbed at the spongy material on the railing and was grateful once again that someone, some companion or another during the last 900 years, had thought about it and had decided to put in some padding. The wadding was nice, but it didn't help Jack when the TARDIS lurched to what he thought of as her "starboard" side and caused him to land with a fair amount of force on his tailbone. By the time he opened his eyes, The Doctor was already up off the floor asking him if he was alright. "I'm not as young as I used to be," was the best he could do as he dragged himself back to a standing position.

AND, they were indeed 'going', but where? The Doctor, although calmer than a few seconds before, was clearing his throat and making some odd sorts of "hmmm" and "ummm" sounds. At the same time the TARDIS engines were at full throttle, and while the lurching had subsided, at least for the present, there was still a whole lot of rocking and rolling going on.

As Jack watched The Doctor he found himself wondering, not for the first time, how much in control The Doctor really was, and what he really knew. Jack had always suspected that The Doctor made a lot of stuff up as he went along. On the one hand, it wasn't a comforting thought but on the other… well… there was no one in the universe that Jack trusted or respected more. Even though at times their relationship – if that was what to call it – was strained, there was little doubt in his mind that he loved the Time Lord and would give up his life, if that were possible, for him. Despite their occasional competitiveness, he wasn't ashamed to sound stupid if the need should arise.

"Do you know where we're going?" asked the Captain.

At first he wasn't sure if The Doctor had even heard him. Or if The Doctor remembered that he was even there. "Okay," Jack sub-vocalized, "maybe I don't love him."

The Doctor turned and flashed his eyes, "Oh, I don't believe that for a second!"


	4. Part 4

**BIG BANG**

**Part IV**

**Stuck With You**

The Doctor went on, deciding that it would be better to get the truth out right away rather than try to sugar coat it. "Come 'ere" he said, in a voice that sounded eerily to Jack like the "previous" Doctor, his friend the U-Boat Captain. "I told her to take us somewhere safe, and she is. We're going back… way back… Farther back than I've ever gone. Farther back than I think any Time Lord has ever been." Hearing himself say the words out loud didn't make them any easier for the Doctor to believe, he was still utterly amazed by what was happening.

He put on his glasses and pointed at the display. "See this symbol, although it is two-dimensional to you, I see it, with the help of the TARDIS, as a six-dimensional shape, and it represents spacetime. The color, form and motion are shifting, do you see?" He looked at Jack, hoping to discern some sign of understanding. He realized he needed Jack to understand, not just because he needed a second mind; he didn't particularly need that kind of help. But rather he needed someone to corroborate, to agree with him. Maybe even to argue with him. He needed a _companion_.

"The changes we're seeing are fluid, and difficult to perceive, but what it's telling us is inarguable -- we've gone back so far that the universe doesn't exist, not like we know it. Or knew it. According to this," he poked at the screen, "we are very close in relativistic terms to the beginning of our universe."

The Doctor knew that this was a lot for Jack to take in. He'd already had a few seconds to assimilate it and a few seconds to a Time Lord was nearly an eternity.

"The TARDIS has taken us to the point in spacetime where she feels it is safe?" Jack asked.

"Yes, nearly; lockdown's been cancelled. She's slowed down but she's still underway. You can feel that she's not stopped yet, can't you?" The Doctor asked. He knew he was pushing Jack a bit. It had only been a few minutes since they were standing outside in sunny Cardiff. A few minutes before that, Jack had probably been with his team, and he'd been waving good-bye to Rose and wondering what to do with his 24-hour pass. He closed his eyes and brought forth an image of Rose: all yellow and pink, smiling, laughing and hugging him. The way he most liked to think of her.

Jack interrupted his daydream. "She'll be okay. We'll figure this out and get through it. We always have and always will."

The Lord of Time opened his eyes and stared, masking astonishment that Jack had read his mind. And waiting for him to continue, which Jack did: "Explain to me again where we are… _When_ we are."

The Doctor formed his thoughts as he removed his glasses. "You know how the universe started, right? The universe as you knew it – as we left it – had expanded to that state from a primordial condition of enormous mass and heat nearly 14 billion years in the past." The Doctor was finding his way and growing more energetic by the second.

"A huge 'fireball' erupted at an initial time-point in spacetime. At that initial time-point, before time started, density, pressure and temperature were infinite. The laws of the universe as we've come to know them – laws like general relativity and gravitation – did not exist. The universe was filled homogenously with these unimaginable temperatures, pressures and densities. And matter and anti-matter…" and at this point The Doctor laughed because he found the scenario quite amusing, "matter and anti-matter had not yet differentiated to become the universe with which we are familiar, where matter predominates over anti-matter. To put it simply, it was a very strange place. Eventually, and the time scale here is amazingly compressed, a sort of phase transition occurred and the elementary particles were formed."

Shrugging his shoulders, he took a deep breath. Even the Time Lords didn't know everything about the beginning of the universe. It was a series of events, larger, more complex and more random than any imagination could fully conceive, which resulted in the universe both he and Jack had known and loved – a universe with gravity and planetary motion and where the speed of light was a constant. But the birth of the universe was a precipitous series of events, and that's what now worried him. If the TARDIS had brought them here, to about – and he had to peer at the display again – about ten to the eleventh power _of a second_ after the initial time-point marking the beginning of the universe, then…

"We're at the time before the creation of protons and neutrons, and before anti-particles were obliterated and protons came to dominate," he said. "That's about as much as I can tell looking at this damned display!" He kicked the console, not so much out of anger but frustration. The TARDIS engines had stopped and other than The Doctor's voice, the room was totally quiet. They were safe in the TARDIS, he knew, and the TARDIS had clearly and finally decided that she had delivered them and herself to a safe place.

"In about a half million years, if things go according to plan, hydrogen atoms will dominate the universe and gravity will start acting on matter – stir it up, wait about 13 billion years, and 'voila!' one universe including stars, planets, and organisms, nicely served…"

The Doctor's voice trailed off as he looked up at Jack and smiled. "Too much? Not enough? Just right?" he asked. Of course he loved Jack, too. If there was anyone else he'd rather be stuck with in the present situation, with all of its potentially horrifying ramifications, he didn't know who that was. Well, maybe he'd rather be with Rose… but if not Rose, then Jack. He was lucky to have those two in his life. Normally he'd be thrilled to have even one such person, but to have two brave, kind, caring, strong and confident people? He was privileged, and he knew it. He'd known from the very beginning of this regeneration that he was lucky, despite all the unlucky things that had happened to his predecessors, and all the unlucky things that had happened and would happen to the current him. He was blessedly fortunate.

And so he looked up at Jack, again and said, "I'm glad you're here," and meant it.

**Jack and Albert**

The Doctor was quiet again, lost in his own thoughts.

It was Jack's turn now to move away and sit on the sole chair. "Why only one?" he wondered as he allowed himself to settle. After all these years, these centuries, he thought, it would've been kind to have set out a couple of extra chairs. Then he laughed quietly to himself, recalling his recent tumble to the floor: "No seatbelt either! Not the best thinking. But then again, it was not unlike The Doctor to be oblivious to sundry comforts.

The Doctor had been watching him. "Something funny?"

Jack nodded almost imperceptibly. Of course, The Doctor's cosmology lecture had been somewhat unnecessary, but because he loved to listen to The Doctor talk, loved to hear the sound of his voice, Jack had allowed him to wax pedagogical. It didn't matter really what The Doctor was talking about… it could be anything… Jack was happy just hearing the words. It was funny because in any other situation it was always the Captain who was the center of attention and the voice everyone listened to. Jack took to the role naturally, like putting on his coat each day. But when he was with The Doctor, he could relax that side of his personality. It wasn't that he was unwilling or unable; rather he became a slightly different person. Not a better or worse person, but a listener – a sounding board – and he liked it.

Jack played another position on this different team. He was now point guard instead of the center on the basketball court, and he was confident enough in his abilities to be able to take any position and run with it. He shrugged and ended that train of thought.

Yes, he knew about the beginning of the universe, and he knew that if the TARDIS had deposited them here, at this point, so soon after the initial boom that as unlikely as it seemed everything _other_ than their little, fragile oasis was terrifyingly different. Hell, "_other_" may not even be definable, much less comprehensible. If the ramifications weren't so catastrophic, it might be intriguing.

"Boss," Jack said, the term more one of endearment than deference, although there was that, too. "I know what it means."

"Yes, I expect you do."

"You know…" Jack leaned back, "I met Einstein."

"You DID?!"

"Yes, twice actually, the first time was in the very early earth twentieth century."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

"And no, I didn't give him any bright ideas. In fact, I didn't speak to him at all other than submit a patent application for a small electromagnetic device…"

The Doctor raised his other eyebrow.

"Well I had to make money somehow! A man's gotta live…"

The Doctor nodded, he could imagine how difficult Jack's life had been on earth all those years that he'd been waiting for the two of them to cross paths again.

"I met him again at Princeton in the 1940's." Jack shook his head. "I don't know how he did it, but he'd remembered me. He recognized my face, although for him my face should've looked 35 years older." Jack let out a long sigh. "I was with the Manhattan Project and had been sent with Oppenheimer and a few others to try to recruit him. We failed, of course – by that time he'd reconsidered his position on the development of atomic weapons of mass destruction."

"But he recognized you? And he knew who you were despite the fact that you hadn't aged?"

"Yes, he took me aside, away from the others and whispered in my ear, 'Is it time dilation or something else?' And then he leaned back and looked at me and smiled, 'No, I suppose you shouldn't tell me. And of course I can tell no one else, correct?'"

Jack was silent with his memory.

"Whelp," The Doctor said finally, breaking the spell and raising his hand in a mock toast. "Here's to you, Albert!"


	5. Part 5

**BIG BANG**

**Part V**

**Spacetime**

And now The Doctor was left with deciding what it was they should do next. He'd an idea, of course. He didn't like it very much but it was the only path he could see. Outside of the TARDIS, spacetime was different. Inside, the timescape was stable, for now; but he didn't know how long that would last. He could feel, in a part of his brain that he was sure Jack didn't have, that the TARDIS, as quiet as she was, was struggling against mighty forces that perhaps even she herself didn't fully understand. He stroked the bit of console in front of him, lending support. She had almost infinite energy, but considering where they were both "infinite" and "energy" were relative terms. With time gone, there was no "infinite" because there was no "finite". And with "energy" being nothing like the concept with which he or the TARDIS was familiar, it was clear she was continuing to exist only by the most tenuous of threads.

He studied Jack's face. He needed to find some way to protect him, not that Jack really needed protecting, of course. But, still, he needed to look after him -- although he wasn't sure what good shielding Jack would do if they were stuck here permanently. There were fates worse than death… and Jack's particular super-power exposed him to living and reliving all sorts of dreadful existences. The 'Seven Circles of Hell' would be like paradise compared to what could happen to Jack if the wrong choice was made.

Still… there was nothing to be done but carry on.

"Jack," he said, "there's something I can do… Something Time Lords can do… That the TARDIS helps with." He took a breath and consciously slowed his pace; wanting to make sure he explained it right. "But it means that I'll change."

Jack looked at him with alarm.

"No, no, no, no… not _that_," The Doctor corrected himself, slowing down again. "It is a trick, a very old trick of the Time Lords'. We extract ourselves from spacetime in order to perceive events outside of it. And when we do this, we are no longer ourselves, because we no longer exist. Time Lords can't exist outside of spacetime."

The Doctor went on, despite himself falling into his lecturer role again. "Let me explain. You know the Time Lords invented black holes, don't you?"

Jack responded with a small sound signifying that he was impressed. He wasn't sure he'd _known_ it, but it didn't surprise him. That confirmation was all The Doctor needed in a way of encouragement.

"Well… we really didn't _invent_ them; not strictly speaking. We tweaked them – we modified them, and we made sure that there were super-massive black holes at the center of every large galaxy.

"We did it because we use the event horizons of those _ginormous_ black holes when we travel. You see, the event horizons of super-massive black holes are impossibly powerful; we utilize the event horizons and manipulate the spacetime tidal forces they generate in order to expand and strengthen our time vortices. The vortices allow us to pass through huge distances in Time and Space by literally bending spacetime." This was said brightly, almost happily, but then The Doctor's face darkened, "And they allow us to circumvent or even leave spacetime, on occasion, when necessary."

The lecture ended abruptly as The Doctor started fussing with the TARDIS console. It was time for action.

"The only way for us to see what is happening is for me to place myself entirely outside of spacetime, and I've never done that before, in any of my existences, although the TARDIS has within her the collective memory of all Time Lords, so she can guide me. With her help, it's possible…" The Doctor's voice faded away, but Jack's picked up where he left off.

"It's possible that you have no idea what you're doing!"

Jack stood up and confronted The Doctor: "Or where you're going!"

"Of course I don't! But I won't really be leaving… I'll still be here, but I'll be elsewhere, too. The TARDIS should protect me."

"The operative word being '_should'_!"

"There's no need to shout!"

"I'm not shouting. I'm simply animated!"

The Doctor grinned. "Indeed you are. And I intend to keep you that way. The TARDIS should protect you as well, but I want to give this back to you." He handed Jack the worn, leather teleport. It felt cold in Jack's hand, its usual pulsing warmth quieted, although he wasn't sure why. "I've always known it was more powerful than you let on," The Doctor added, with not a little bit of accusatory tone thrown in for good measure. Jack made as if to disagree but The Doctor held up a hand. "I don't want to hear about it. But, along with the TARDIS it may at least give you a fighting chance if something impossible happens."

**Best Intentions**

"Are you going to tell me or what?" Jack asked.

"What, what?"

"What you're about to do?"

"Well… either I'm going to be leaving spacetime or spacetime is going to be leaving me. I think it's probably the former, but it might be the latter, or it might be a combination thereof, or neither!" The Doctor chuckled, but it sounded nervous. "I'm not sure it really matters. In the end, I will be here but I won't. I'll be somewhere and, I think, _something_ else. And I should be able to see what is happening and perhaps figure out a way we might fix it."

While he spoke, a device dropped leisurely down on a cable from the ceiling of the TARDIS. It looked a bit like a small model of a solar system. A large, almost painfully bright round body, attached to the slim cable, was gracefully orbited freely by smaller round bodies that glowed like semi-transparent opals. Jack thought it beautiful and stood transfixed for a moment as The Doctor walked around the apparatus, closely examining it, and then stopped and looked at him.

"I operate comfortably within spacetime. I know that what humans think of as the fourth dimension, time, is actually _three_ different temporal dimensions, and that there are many, many more dimensions than the four humans postulated back in the early twenty-first century on earth… But, blimey, you were getting closer with 'M-theory!'…." The Doctor realized he was lecturing again and, really they had absolutely _no time_ for it. "Ha!" He thought. "I've made a pun!"

He laughed at himself and added: "I'm firmly anchored to the multiple dimensions of our universe and I manipulate them, and spacetime, at will, with the help of the TARDIS. I'm going to be leaving that comfortable place, and I don't know where or what I'll be when I go. Does that answer your question?"

Without waiting for an answer The Doctor turned back to the device that had descended from the ceiling. "It_ is_ beautiful, isn't it?

"At its heart it holds a micro black hole. We didn't invent those, either, but we learned to manage them, in part for the good of life in the galaxies. You can't have micro black holes wandering aimlessly through inhabited solar systems! The Time Lords also learned to harness and use them, and that's in part what you see here; there is an impossibly small singularity at the center of this device. The bright light you see is its event horizon; the objects orbiting it have the ideal mass, relative to the larger central object, to sustain the proper amounts of attraction and gravitation required to support perfectly stable circular orbits."

The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver, pointed it at the mechanism for a moment and then brought his hand down and placed the screwdriver back into his pocket. Jack noticed the device had changed its location slightly in order to be exactly at The Doctor's eye-level. Or maybe The Doctor had altered _his _location. Jack was starting to feel like he was hallucinating; he wrapped his hand tightly around his teleport. It was ice cold.

Then the mechanism started to sing. It was beautiful music, but rather than the kind of music you hear, it was the kind of music you felt. Jack knew that it was unlike anything he'd ever heard before, and he was "hearing" it not with his ears but his… it felt like he was hearing it with his chest. Was he hearing it with heart? Was he hearing it with his soul? The music was speaking to him in ways that were impossible, and yet in ways he'd always wanted to be spoken to. It spoke to him in ways of harmonics, in ways of temperature, in ways of energy, in ways of movement, and of gravity and light, but the words, the song, were inside of him, not outside.

He looked in wonder at The Doctor. The Doctor's eyes were open but unseeing. As Jack watched, the color of The Doctor's eyes began to change from deep, dark brown to something translucent; their color matching the smaller orbiting objects in the device that had drifted from the TARDIS ceiling.

In fact, Jack realized, he was having trouble distinguishing The Doctor's eyes from the small objects in the device. No, wait… he was having trouble distinguishing The Doctor _from_ The Device.

And then, despite all the best intentions of everyone involved, Something Very Bad Happened.

**A Life in Film**

The music wasn't music any more. It clutched at Jack's heart and it pummeled at his soul. He fell against the railing and then down onto the floor, shutting his eyes and closing his ears but to no effect.

He felt himself being stretched and being pulled and being compressed all at the same time. He felt his skin crawling and tingling and his heart racing and quieting simultaneously. He'd been dead before… many times… but nothing had ever felt like this. He felt parts of himself disappearing, completely and permanently. He felt his memories being torn from him violently, removed forever from his consciousness. His hand, which a minute before had been closed tightly on his teleport suddenly was gone, and the wristband with it. His face, his eyes, his ears were vanishing. He was having trouble even being cognizant of the changes that he was experiencing. Jack painfully realized that he was losing the ability to remember what he was and what was being taken from him. His sight… his hearing… his sense of touch…

"No!" he screamed and wasn't sure he'd actually made a sound, but he continued with what ever it was he'd been left with: "I refuse to let this happen! This must not be allowed! It must stop!"

It was no good. He wasn't breathing. He wasn't communicating. And even if he could, who would listen? Who _could_ hear him?

In his mind, what was left of it, there was a film being shown. It was his life, in bits and pieces. He saw his childhood and his brother, and the years of his later youth when he wandered the galaxy. He watched things he'd done as a Time Agent, many of them not to be so proud of. The Doctor appeared – the first Doctor that he'd met, and then the second. Rose was there, and Ianto, and the rest of his team. He wanted to hang on to them, hold them close; he knew once they passed that they were gone for good. There'd be nothing left of him, nothing recognizable.

"Is this death?" he mused, using the last of himself to wonder. "Finally? What I'd wanted all those years? Now? Like this?"

He envisioned pulling himself up and standing, even though there was nothing left to rise. "Noooooo!" he screamed one last time, and disappeared.


	6. Part 6

**BIG BANG**

**Part VI**

**Beyond Comprehension**

"What are you doing here?" The Doctor's voice said.

"Huh?" Jack's shoulder hurt. And not just his shoulder, but that's what hurt the worst.

"What are you doing here?"

Jack opened his eyes. He was in the TARDIS, but not the TARDIS. It was different in vast and unimaginable ways; he was tempted but he'd have to categorize them later. He was different, too, but he'd have to deal with that later as well.

And he was looking at The Doctor, but not The Doctor. "I'm here because something has gone wrong."

The Doctor spoke to him, but his mouth did not move. "Yes, you are correct, something is wrong, but it is you that is wrong. You're not supposed to be here."

"What have you done with my friend?" Jack changed the subject, not liking the direction the discussion was going.

"What friend? Who?" There was a pause. "Oh, you mean this one?" The Doctor's voice replied. "He's gone. He didn't fight as you did. He didn't hold back. But he was interesting. There was a lot more to him than you."

"Gee, thanks," Jack muttered beneath his breath.

"Where am I?" he asked, trying to keep the conversation moving.

"You are in our reality; we've looked into your mind and have tried to approximate your existence as closely as possible to accommodate your limited ability to communicate." It hurt Jack to hear the harsh words spoken by the Doctor's voice. "From what we've seen of your various imperfections, our reality would cause you to go mad, if not cease to exist totally."

"Well, that doesn't sound so good."

"No, as we said, you don't belong here."

"We?"

"Yes, there are many of us – vast numbers of a type and quantity beyond your comprehension."

"Beyond my comprehension… You must think I'm pretty stupid."

"Compared to us, you are."

"You remind me of a friend, the way you talk."

Jack asked, he thought it wouldn't hurt to try: "Can I have my friend back?"

"No. Tell us why and how you came to be here."

Jack quickly weighed his options. He saw no reason to lie… perhaps to retain some information just in case, but there was little reason to not be honest; and perhaps powerful incentives to speak the truth.

"We were brought here, to this point in our temporal reality, because our existence and the existence of others like us were threatened."

"Brought here by what?"

"By an intelligence I do not understand or control" – he was being at least partially truthful there. "It brought us here because it is safe."

The Doctor's voice laughed at this. "You are hardly safe."

"At least I'm alive."

"You are not even that. You are in between life and completely ceasing to exist."

**A Simple Goal**

The conversation, as well as voice of The Doctor, was starting to depress Jack.

He fought the urge to go silent and give up. He knew the part he was playing was critical and that for the moment a lot depended on him.

"I've shown you mine, now you show me yours," Jack said, thinking that he'd always wanted to say that to The Doctor.

"Yes, we can tell you this. We will use terms harvested from your mind, so that you can understand." Jack thought he noted a derisive tone to the words. "We've come to terraform this place, your universe. We've come from your before, and we do not want to cease to be; we wish to continue. This we will do, but we must change all things. We can not live in your universe, with your physical laws. We are not matter as you know it, our universe developed differently and we will alter the development of yours to suit our needs."

"It's a straightforward enough goal, I suppose, but what of those whom you destroy?"

"They will never be. There will be no destruction because they will never have existed. It is as simple as that."

Again, Jack didn't see the point of pursuing the topic, so he moved on. "Can I see you?"

"No we are so unlike you, the place we come from is so peculiar as to be beyond…"

"Yes, beyond my comprehension, I know," Interrupted Jack. He'd heard that once too many times for his liking.

"You _are_ primitive…" the voice had a quality of becoming weary. Jack worried that he was running out of directions, so he retried an old one.

"Can I have my friend back?"

"No… Why?"

"Ah-ha!" thought Jack. At least something different this time…

"I don't know… what do you want to hear? I miss him. I love him. I want him back. He's special and unique and should be allowed to exist. He's important to me and is deserving of your respect. He's got a wonderful sense of humor, is smarter than anyone I know and has a great body. He's got beautiful brown eyes, a smile that would melt your heart, if you had a heart, and the most magnificent, contagious laugh.

"He has freckles on his face and a mole between his shoulders. He constantly amazes and astonishes me. He has a brilliant mind, a kind heart and a gentle soul. He is phenomenally brave. He has elegant, graceful hands. He makes me laugh and he makes me cry. He drives me crazy sometimes, and people who meet him either love him or fear him. He is my friend and more. I love him and would die for him."

Jack wasn't sure if this last bit had been wise, but he continued, "Is that enough or do you want more?"

"But he is not simply dissimilar; he is vastly different from you."

"My universe is one of infinite diversity; we coexist."

"Yesss…" the voice hissed. And Jack's world went black.


	7. Part 7

**BIG BANG**

**Part VII**

**Love Times Two**

"Jack…. Jack…. Jack…." The Doctor's voice chanted, over and over.

Jack's shoulder hurt, but the pain was different than before. It felt like someone was pressing it, punching it.

"Ouch! Don't do that!" Jack opened his eyes and focused on the face above his.

It was The Doctor. "Jack, are you all right?" The Doctor's hand was gripping Jack's left shoulder with unexpected strength.

"I will be once you stop trying to dislocate my joint!"

Instead of letting loose, The Doctor grabbed Jack's right shoulder with his other hand and abruptly Jack was standing, The Doctor hugging him and laughing, "You are a most uncommon man!"

Jack hugged back. "Is that really you?"

"Oh, yes. It's me," The Doctor stepped back, his warmth lingering. Jack suddenly felt weak and leaned against the railing. "The railing!" he said out loud, not meaning to but there it was… "The TARDIS, is she okay?"

"If I'm okay, she's okay. And if she's okay, I'm okay." The Doctor twirled around in a little dance, once again scrutinizing his ship. She did indeed look right, and feel right. "But…"

"But?" asked Jack.

"Well, I woke up and I felt like myself, and the TARDIS felt like herself, but we felt different, too." The Doctor wasn't quite sure how to put this into words, but they blurted out of him of their own accord. "Those are fantastic beings, if one were to name them beings. They aren't even that. Or rather they are so much more than that. Nor are they even really a 'they', although I'll use it for lack of a better term.

"They exist, but on a plain -- at a level -- that is unlike anything I've ever imagined. They are incredibly old, vastly conscious, phenomenally complex, and brilliantly intelligent. Encountering them was unlike any experience I've ever had. They are so astonishing as to…"

Jack interrupted, he couldn't help himself, "Be beyond my understanding, I know!"

The Doctor's eyes flashed, his smile gone. "No! As to impress even me," he growled. But then he quickly moved on.

"When they were with you, I was with them. I was in a place so very different from any I've ever been before, communicating with them in ways I've never imagined. But at the same time, I heard everything they said to _you _and felt what they felt when you told them that you loved me. _Both_ times you told them that you loved me."

Jack blushed and looked at the floor. He'd spoken the truth…

The Doctor went on. "They're not just incredibly ancient… they are not just from before our universe, they are from BEFORE the universe that was before our universe.

"You see, they've done it once already. They've terraformed a universe."

Jack was glad he was still leaning against the railing.

**Masters of the Universes**

"Their home universe died a normal death from old age billions and billions of years ago." The Doctor smiled at his terminology, it reminded him of a particular human astronomer he'd been close to, once upon a time. "Their universe had a totally different set of physical laws from our own. Time flowed non-linearly. There was a breathtaking amount of homogeneity. Matter and anti-matter did not form the way they did at the beginning of our universe. Everything was different, the primordial elements didn't evolve. Galaxies weren't created. Instead, theirs was a universe entirely, as far as I can tell, of what we'd call dark matter and dark energy: infinitely unified, infinitely cold and infinitely dark."

The Doctor closed his eyes and breathed in. "But their universe was not cold or dark to them. To them, it was beautiful, full of light and warmth and life as they perceived those things. But there was one thing their universe did have in common with ours." Again The Doctor paused, but then continued, "Death."

"They mastered their universe and its physical laws, much in the way the Time Lords had begun to master our universe and its laws. They achieved ultimate harmony; were completely homogeneous with their universe – they _were_ their universe, and their universe was them. They looked for a way to survive their natural extinction and they found one. They protected themselves and watched. And when everything was as it needed to be, they manipulated events on an enormous scale in order to recreate what they'd lost. And they were successful."

Jack nodded, "Terraforming on a cosmic scale. Never mind what they destroyed."

The Doctor's eyes flashed again. "No, you're right. They don't see things that way. They have no concept of time. Their concept of existence is radically different. They have an incredible amount of arrogance and a belief that their needs outweigh all others."

Jack was relieved. He'd been worried that The Doctor had been co-opted somehow, or had become completely and inextricably infatuated with these beings.

"But… don't they recognize what they are obliterating? How could they raze an entire universe?"

The Doctor sighed; sometimes it was like arguing with a wall, these humans… especially this one. "They are the closest thing to a god I've ever encountered. For all intents and purposes they are gods. They don't really have a name for themselves, but their sense of self-identity would be similar to our word for cosmos. We are to them as a piece of fluff… no, a molecule in a piece of fluff, would be to you. We are nothing. Your conversation with them – you were more of a curiosity than anything else."

"But you said that they felt what I felt!"

"Yes, they did, it intrigued them. And they returned me based on what you said. But it won't matter in the end, they don't care. They're not evil or good, compassionate or unfeeling, malevolent or benevolent. They just _are_. We are inconsequential to them and they are oblivious of us."

"Now you know what it feels like," Jack muttered under his breath, but The Doctor ignored him.

"We're in a bubble that the TARDIS has created and is sustaining at no small cost – she's protecting us; holding our heads above the waves of spacetime change that are washing over everything we know. But _they _allow the TARDIS to do this, and on some level we're probably so insignificant it doesn't matter what we do; they may forget entirely and allow us to live the rest of our lives here, like this, imprisoned as a dragonfly in amber. Or with little if any forethought they could come about and extinguish us."

Jack smiled. It felt a little strange, like he'd not done it in awhile. "You do have a gob, don't you?"

"Yep," The Doctor smiled back.


	8. Part 8

**BIG BANG**

**Part VIII**

**A Broken Heart**

"So, there's nothing we can do?" asked Jack.

"I didn't say that…" The Doctor nodded his head towards the device that he'd used earlier, floating forlornly from the ceiling. "I could always try it again."

"I have a bad feeling about that," was Jack's response. He hadn't liked it the first time The Doctor used it and felt he'd probably like it even less the next time. "Are there any other options? What have we got?"

"What have we got? What have we got? What have we got? Well, we have the TARDIS." The Doctor's eyes traveled down Jack's body. "We have you and your teleport. And we've got me. How's that for starters?"

"No surprises then?"

The Doctor rubbed his head, mussing up his hair even more than it had been. "No… No surprises. No magic up my sleeve." He wiggled the fingers of his right hand in front of Jack's face and then shrugged. "Besides…"

"Besides what?"

"Besides, I don't know if we ought to do anything. Jack, you should've experienced them… it... whatever…. They are astonishing. I don't know if I have the right to commit genocide, even if I could, and that _is_ what we're talking about, against such a race such as this. They are eons beyond the Time Lords! What right do I have to snuff them out? It is a responsibility I don't want! They aren't the Daleks! They aren't evil, they are remarkable. I should safeguard them!"

"But look at what they've done! At what they're going to do! Everything you've protected, everything you've cared for. Everything you love. Gone, all of it! No – more than gone: never having been. It is unconscionable that you could contemplate allowing it! Remember Rose! Remember Albert bloody Einstein! You are responsible to _them_; you owe _them _your allegiance and your protection!"

"Who am I to say these magnificent beings have no right to exist?"

Jack looked at him in despair and apprehension. "You're The Doctor!"

"No I'm not."

Jack's heart beat once, and then again, but he knew it was broken. Those were the three words he feared the most. Had his fears somehow conjured them up? Could it be his fault? He didn't want to ask, but he had no choice… It was either move forward or give up, and the latter was never an option. He bulwarked himself.

"What do you mean you're not The Doctor?"

The Doctor, watching Jack's face, infinitesimally softened his own. "No, I'm sorry Jack. That's not what I meant. I am The Doctor. I _am_ him. But leaving our reality for theirs changed me, just as I'd said it would, and as I knew it must. I know them now, and they are a part of me -- always and forever.

"For any sane organism, it is easier to kill someone you don't know than kill someone you do. War is always easier depersonalized. I could no more extinguish them now, having known them, than I could extinguish the Time Lords." His expression was one of incredible sadness. "At least not on purpose," he added. His hands, the moment before so animated dropped listlessly and his shoulders sagged.

"Well, that's bad news."

"No, Jack, it isn't. That's the good news. I'm not a mass murderer or a weapon of mass destruction, no matter what you may think, or hope. Nor am I a god, vengeful or otherwise. I'm The Doctor and just The Doctor. Mind you, most of the time that's pretty good, but right now at this very moment…"

"If they prick you, do you not bleed?"

"Yep, something like that…"

The two men were quiet for a time. Jack was starting to wonder if they were finally running out of things to say to each other. Maybe it was time to pull out a chess board or a deck of cards… Hell, maybe there was a basketball court somewhere on the TARDIS. He found himself speculating if The Doctor even played games, physical or otherwise. But then he remembered something…

"You said that's the _good_ news?"

"Yes, that's what I said."

"So what's the bad?"

"The bad news," The Doctor continued, "is that even with the TARDIS and your teleport, and with your and my considerable talents and abilities, there's nothing we can do. There's nothing _to_ do, it's already too late. I discovered this when I was with them; what's going to happen has already happened and is happening now.

"They go to work at the beginning when the conditions are right later – remember for them that time is nonlinear – and when the amount of mass, the level of expansion, the consistency of the universe, its gradient temperature, and all the other factors reach a perfect pitch, they act. Well, they've already acted and the change has been made.

"It's over," The Doctor added vehemently, "for Rose and for your 'Albert bloody Einstein'."

**Worse Things**

The Doctor felt badly for Jack. He knew what it was like to be the last of his kind, and now that 'honor' had been awarded to Jack as well. He also knew Jack was denying the inevitable truth, and looking for a way to fight it. Jack _would_ perform genocide if given the reason and the chance. And he, The Doctor, wouldn't allow it. Not now, that it was too late and the change already made. That was the difference… just like the last time that they'd remodeled an entire universe to fit their needs, these beings had done it again and stopping them was impossible…

The Doctor's reveries were interrupted by Jack. "Doctor we have to go back!"

"I've already told you, we can't. They're gone, all of them… everything is gone. They've never been."

"No, that's not what I meant!"

The Doctor looked at Jack, his mind moving in a hundred different directions at once. What was it that Jack was asking of him? What had he just been thinking before Jack interrupted him? Right… that stopping them now was impossible. And yes, that was true, but…

"Jack! You're brilliant!" He let out a joyful whoop. "We have to go back before our Big Bang, to _their_ universe, and stop them – get them to stop – ask them, convince them, persuade them…"

Jack had to complete the sentence for The Doctor: "Persuade them to commit suicide." It was a simple as that. Although in his heart and soul Jack was prepared to do more… much more. His hand gripped the teleport deep in his pocket.

"No guarantees," said The Doctor.

"No guarantees," acknowledged Jack.

"It will be a one-way trip for all three of us," The Doctor stroked the TARDIS console. "Mind you, I'm not entirely sure that she can do it, but if she can, there's likely no way she'll be able to bring us back. I'll have to use the micro black hole in the spacetime device to take us there, but once it has, it will no longer exist." The Doctor looked lovingly at his ship. "It's the only singularity we have.

"Once we're there, all bets are off; we have to assume we'll be stuck at the end of _their_ universe."

Jack nodded and smiled, "Together, at the end of the universe. I can think of worse things."

"We'll also be changed."

"What do you mean?"

"We can't exist in their universe. You knew that already – they told you, and it is true. In their universe we'd be beyond a paradox, we'll be impossible; we're made up of atoms and forces that can't exist in their universe. The TARDIS would be impossible because she is a time machine and time doesn't exist in their universe. So the TARDIS will have to change us into something incomprehensible, and change herself as well. I don't know what it will feel like; I don't know if we'll have feelings or anything remotely equivalent. I'm not even sure we'll be able to communicate."

The Doctor's eyes roamed around his ship and then he continued, "It's a shot in the dark that might fully qualify as one of your 'worse things'."

"Doctor," Jack said, "I think I might know something about this." He went on to explain what it had felt like earlier when The Very Bad Thing Happened. He described being pulled asunder and compressed simultaneously.

The Doctor nodded. "Oi! Sounds painful!" he paused a beat. "There's no way to know if it will be like that or not, and there will be no turning back once we make the leap, are you sure it's what you want to do? There's no way I can protect you. I can't leave you behind – it is all or nothing."

"I wouldn't let you leave me behind. You need me."

"Yes, I do."

"Then?"

"Then… Allons-y mon Capitaine!"


	9. Part 9

**BIG BANG**

**Part IX**

**Always be Prepared**

Jack was left to his own thoughts as The Doctor made preparations. The Doctor was speaking, but not to Jack, and not _at_ the TARDIS. It was clear that The Doctor was conversing _with_ the TARDIS, and she was answering him back in ways imperceptible to Jack. He wasn't jealous, although in another time and place he imagined he could be – he was too busy thinking about other things. He suspected from his earlier experience that The Doctor and he wouldn't have much "time" once they'd made the jump. They would need to make a convincing case instantaneously with their shift. Jack also suspected that the beings would be as close to omnipotent and omniscient as anything he'd ever encountered. Tricking them would be nearly if not absolutely impossible.

The Doctor turned towards him, "She's ready, come here," he said and held out his right hand. Jack walked over and took The Doctor's extended hand in his left; the Doctor then placed Jack's hand over a small round button on the TARDIS console and covered it firmly with his own. "Put your other hand on the console as well, just there," The Doctor nodded farther to Jack's right, at one of the few "unoccupied" areas of the console. The Doctor's free hand was hovering over a small, pulsing light. "Close your eyes and think of me," he said as he moved his left hand down onto the light, "and don't stop."

**White Room**

Jack?

Doctor?

Hello!

Hello?

When I told you to think of me, I didn't expect you to think that.

Well… you didn't qualify it.

No, I suppose I didn't. You have quite an imagination…. Don't stop.

What!?

Don't stop thinking about me.

Hokay. Where are we?

Open your eyes.

They were in a white space. A huge white space… Unbelievably massive. Possibly infinite. And totally empty. Except for them.

The Doctor was standing maybe fifty yards away, looking up.

You didn't exactly answer my question.

We're here.

The Doctor was not really speaking, nor was Jack. It was as if Jack was talking to himself, but one of the two voices happened to sound like The Doctor.

I am here, said The Doctor. And so are you. What you are seeing is a construct of the TARDIS. No! Don't think of her, think of me. She's here, too, but she's too busy thinking of us to communicate, besides, she's a little shy.

Jack concentrated on The Doctor, who was now about ten feet away and looking straight at him. He looked at The Doctor's brown eyes, everything else surrounding those eyes so very pale in comparison.

What next? Jack asked.

I'm already doing it. Attend and listen, you can hear me.

The Doctor was fifty yards away again and facing in the opposite direction. He was speaking to Jack and yet to more than Jack.

You have no right to do this, he was saying. You've had your time, and more, and now you must step aside to allow those that follow you to have theirs. This is the way of all things.

A third voice: It is not our way!

No, you are wrong. Everything has its time.

You can not know this.

I can, I have it on good authority, and I know something else: men should not play at being God.

We do not agree; playing is only a step from becoming.

We deserve our chance, interjected Jack.

The Doctor now stood next to him.

You are nothing the third voice said.

We are everything, until we're not.

That had been a fourth voice. No, Jack realized, not a fourth voice, but rather his voice combined with The Doctor's. _Their_ voice.

We are better.

How can you say that? asked The Doctor/Jack.

We are advanced. You are less than nothing.

You can not know us. You can not know who we are. You can not know what we will become.

We do not care.

Jack's left hand searched for and found the strap of worn leather in his pocket. He was totally focused on The Doctor and the debate taking place, but he compartmentalized the tiniest fraction of himself and centered it on the wristband.

Jack! The Doctor was now facing him, and it was his voice alone that was growling. What are you doing?

You're not the only one with your own personal black hole!

The Doctor was now behind him, their backs touching.

You have a singularity?

Yeah.

That's impossible!

Yes it is, Jack hissed.

A trillion voices boomed out at once: YOU WOULD DO THIS?

Yes was the joint response. Together Jack and The Doctor pressed the key to release the singularity, and the TARDIS smiled.


	10. Part 10

**BIG BANG**

**Part X**

**Human Attributes**

The TARDIS had known and by definition so had The Doctor. What they didn't know, what they couldn't have known, was if Jack would act in a particular way. Jack was not a mass-murderer, although he _was_ human and capable of it. Beyond that, humans were born with certain attributes built-in, and Jack's attributes were stronger than most. His will to survive had allowed Rose to save his life and turn him into an immortal. His desire to protect and serve had driven him to extremes unfathomable to all but a very few. Conflict and fear strengthened rather than deterred or weakened him. On top of all that, he had an unshakable mind of his own. All of this they knew very well, The Doctor and his TARDIS. But in the end, aside from the fact that the laws of probability almost certainly did not apply in that other universe, they could not with absolute certainty predict this one man's mind, his actions and their outcome.

The Doctor and his TARDIS had prepared well. When the event horizon formed, and the tidal forces approached infinity, the TARDIS targeted herself towards the singularity and on what lay beyond. As to what was beyond, they could only speculate. They knew they would leave _that_ universe and would in all likelihood become lost beyond spacetime. The Doctor had said it would be a one-way trip and so it was the truth and to be expected. A one-way trip where they would end up outside where they'd been… somewhere else, whatever and whenever that "somewhere" was.

**Message in a Bottle**

"Jack…. Jack…. Jack…." The Doctor's voice chanted, over and over.

Jack just wanted to sleep. And his shoulder hurt. It was his left shoulder and it hurt like hell. Come to think of it, so did his left elbow and hand. In fact, he'd say, if he were asked, that his whole left arm hurt.

"Jack, wake up!"

Jack opened his eyes and focused on the face above.

"It's about time! I thought you were going to sleep forever!"

Jack closed his eyes and opened them again. Still the same… except now the face was smiling. How could that be? He looked beyond The Doctor to the wall of the TARDIS. He saw nothing unusual there, or on the ceiling, aside from the fact that the spacetime device was gone. The floor felt comfortingly familiar, too; after all, he'd spent enough time on it recently. He looked back at the Doctor, who was still smiling, and waiting, patiently.

"Hello!" said the Doctor.

"Hello. You wanna tell me what's happening?"

"I'll do better than that!" exclaimed The Doctor. "I'll show you, if you can raise that pathetic bag of bones you call a body up off the floor!"

Jack groaned as he slowly lifted himself upright, without, he noticed this time, The Doctor's help.

The Doctor was already across the room, standing at the TARDIS entrance. With a theatrical flourish he threw the doors open and said, a little louder than necessary (because Jack was actually quite close behind him), "Come 'ere and have a look!"

What Jack saw when he looked out the doors took his breath away: it was the exquisite and incomparable dark of deep space. But off in the distance, way off in the distance was an agonizingly bright pulsating ball of fire that seemed to be made up of all the colors of the spectrum, and then some.

"It's really not all that far away," said The Doctor of the fireball. "It's actually a lot closer than you think, and the TARDIS has taken us out of time, just a wee bit, so we can observe it. You see, it's your singularity, the one that you so cleverly hid." The Doctor turned and smiled at him, the biggest, freest smile that Jack thought he'd ever seen on The Doctor's face. "That impossible singularity from our universe… introducing it made their universe impossible and made them impossible; the TARDIS brought us through its event horizon to the other side and there it is, your black hole, in all it's glory."

Jack wasn't sure what The Doctor was telling him. His knees were feeling a bit weak and his mind was reeling from the idea that his plan, so impossible-seeming in the first place, had actually sort of worked.

"Jack," said The Doctor, putting his arm around the Captain's shoulders, "that's your singularity and what we're seeing is our Big Bang. That singularity is the beginning. You're seeing the birth of our universe."

The Time Lord gently moved Jack away from the entrance and shut the doors.

"Do you want to go home?"

"Is there a home to go back to?"

"Most definitely!" replied the Doctor, and then he continued when the reaction he was looking for on Jack's face didn't occur. "You still don't understand do you, what you did? There's nothing to get in the way of our universe's proceeding as it was meant to be. Before you know it, matter will come to dominate this new universe, and the first star will begin to shine! I can even take you there if you like! We can see the first star shine! Would you like that, Jack? The first star? Hmmm?"

They walked back to the TARDIS console, The Doctor peering at a few displays.

"So I'm God?" asked Jack.

The Doctor laughed. "No, you're not God, don't flatter yourself; you're not even close, and you can trust me on that!"

"Then I'm the other guy, because…" Jack couldn't go on. He hadn't expected nor wanted to survive the culmination of his plan, hadn't anticipated having to live with the knowledge of what he'd done, nor the guilt.

"No, you're not the other guy either. There's something else I want you to see." The Doctor pressed a key on a keyboard and then pointed up, above their heads: "Watch. They left us a message."

What looked like a dense cloud formed up near the ceiling of the TARDIS. Jack wondered sullenly for a moment if he was going to be both depressed _and_ soaking wet, and weren't they basically the same thing anyways?

The cloud coalesced and spoke. "We understand," it said, "come back for us if you can."

And then it was gone.

The Doctor turned to Jack. "They allowed us to leave, and helped the TARDIS carry us forward to where we belong. The singularity did surprise them – good work by the way – but if they hadn't surrendered and cooperated, you would have never been permitted to do what you did with it, the TARDIS could not have found her way through the singularity's event horizon, and we would've never escaped. Do you see?"

"I'm not sure," whispered Jack. "All I see is that you're a bastard because you knew all along what I was going to do and you let me to do it."

"No, I'm not a bastard, Jack. I'm a coward," was the whisper-soft response. "In the presence of a hero."

Several minutes passed, the two men unmoving, looking at each other.

Finally, Jack sighed and shook his head. "You're neither. You're The Doctor and God help me but I love you." He opened his arms, held them wide and grinned. The Doctor moved in and embraced him, but then stood back, eyebrows raised, hands back in his pockets.

"And here's how much I love you: I'll give you a second chance. Do you want to go home?"

"Yeah, I do," said Jack, meaning it, as he sat down on the sole chair in the TARDIS control room.

"Although, if you put in another chair… I might be convinced to stay."


	11. Part 11

**BIG BANG**

**Part XI**

**Farewells **

The Doctor had let Jack off at the Millennium Centre. Being quite early in the morning, there was no one to see the two men embrace and then separate. The Doctor went back into his TARDIS and Jack turned, watched and waved with his left hand as the ship slowly dematerialized. There was a worn leather band around his left wrist, and he smiled as he turned and walked away.

**Hellos**

He parked the TARDIS a few blocks away and walked. It had been slightly less than twenty-four hours for her. "Close enough for government work!" he thought, wanting very much to see her, even if he was a tiny bit early. As he walked, he thought about Jack. The Captain wasn't out of the woods yet, dealing with what he'd done; what _they'd_ done, really. Some day, they had agreed, The Doctor and Jack would find a way to go back for them, those beings; and search for a way to coexist. Anything was possible in The Doctor's universe, even the impossible!

Turning a corner, he caught his breath, and there she was – sitting on the curb outside her mother's flat at the Powell Estate. Rose was wearing a low-cut dress, The Doctor noticed, quite short and very tight. Her shoes were off and sitting next to her on the sidewalk. The Doctor seemed to remember they were called "spikes" and he could easily see why the name was appropriate – she'd be five inches taller in them and he found the idea intriguing. Rose's eyes were closed and she was holding what looked like an ice bag to her forehead. She had what appeared to be small twigs and a couple of leaves sticking out of her hair, which had looked better at various times in the past, if not most. The Doctor smiled at the sight and paused, wanting to savor the moment and not wishing to disturb her. But although he stood quietly, and hadn't made any sort of sound in his approach, she instinctively knew, somehow, that he was there. She opened her eyes, lowered her ice bag and beamed at him.

**Small Favors**

Wil gave a start as she woke up in her office, her head on her desk. She looked around in surprise, wondering how in the world she'd managed to fall asleep while at work. "I must be exhausted," she said to herself as she rubbed her eyes and fussed with her hair. At least her door had been closed, thank goodness for small favors. Thinking she'd check her email before she left for home, she jiggled her mouse but instead of seeing her usual desktop, she was confronted by a pale gray screen and three words in small, black font at the center of the display that read:

Torchwood (click here)

She shrugged and used her mouse to click on the words. Another screen rendered with the GPS coordinates for a single address, tomorrow's date and a time.

Back at her flat, Wil grabbed a backpack off the floor and threw it over her shoulder. She picked up the small glass aquarium sitting on her kitchen table and examined the two turtles that lived inside. She hit the lights and walked out the door without locking it. "So, Sampson and Delilah," she said to the turtles in their container "Are you ready to move to Cardiff?"

**FINIS**

_The Sequel to "Big Bang" is called "Terraform." Read on!_


End file.
